


Exit Strategies: Companions and Endings

by PlaidAdder



Series: Doctor Who Meta [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Companions, Episode: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, Episode: s02e13 Doomsday, Episode: s03e12 The Sound of Drums, Episode: s04e09 Forest of the Dead, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Steven Moffat Era, Weeping Angels - Freeform, companion farewells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:10:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonfiction. In a further attempt to explain why Donna's exit is so much more traumatic than any of DW's other tragic goodbyes, I wrote up this piece about all the companions' exits so far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exit Strategies: Companions and Endings

So, most of the time I just sit here farming my little tiny plot of tumblr and nobody notices. But this post of mine objecting to “Journey’s End” has been circulating a bit lately, and generating the occasional rebuttal. And as I haven’t seen “Time of the Doctor” yet—which means I can’t spoil it for anyone for, woohoo—and Christmas is pretty much over and I have some time, I thought I would just review all the companion exits since 2005 and address this whole question of how to give a companion a decent send-off…and the question of endings. Happy endings, unhappy endings, and endings that are just wrong.

During the Russell T. Davies era, every series ended with the departure of either the Doctor or the Companion. Obviously not all of that was planned; presumably when they cast Eccleston they were hoping to get more than one season out of him. All the same, the result was that the ending of a series during his era was inevitably going to involve both a loss for the viewers and a loss for the surviving member of the Doctor/Companion pair. It usually also involved saving the earth and/or universe from imminent destruction. So RTD’s typical series finale was Happy Ending…With A Price. 

I don’t, in general, mind that ending. I might even say that it is my favorite of the flavors. The Price makes the ending more credible, and the good feelings mean more when set against the painful ones. (I think this is how emotion works in real life in general, but I digress.) I don’t even mind that this usually means that the Companion winds up paying a pretty hefty price. Rose nearly dies at the end of Series 1, and survives only at the cost of losing  _her_  Doctor. And at the end of Series 2, once again, the universes are saved from the Daleks and Cybermen…and the price is that Rose and Ten are separated, as far as they know, For Ever. At this point, the Price is so high that we don’t really experience this as a happy ending. Basically, if you care at all about either character, that ending rips your heart out and leaves it bleeding on the floor.

I was all right with that ending. That’s because, as in the Series 1 ending, Rose goes out a hero. Rose, after willingly sacrificing her family and for all she knows her life to be with the Doctor, loses the man she gave all that up for while saving the universe. The iconic image of the two of them, on opposite sides of the same piece of drywall, banging on it in agony, is tragic; but it does nothing to erode the dignity that her character has earned over the past two seasons. Rose is still Rose, only with a broken heart. 

Martha Jones got the softest landing of all the companions, probably because they were planning to bring her into Torchwood. As in both previous series endings, Martha pays a huge amount of the Price. Her entire family is essentially enslaved, she spends a year traveling the world hunted and on the run, and so on. But Martha’s ending is much closer to happy than Rose’s, because she leaves the TARDIS under her own power. She’s the only New Who companion who does that. All the others seem to have decided that they’re going to be carried out of the TARDIS feet first. This in itself is a problem, in that it means that apart from Martha all the companions basically treat the Doctor as if he’s more important than they are. At any rate, Martha goes out not only having saved Earth from Master Looney Tunes and his flying heads, but having kept her agency. 

And agency is exactly what gets stripped—not just from Donna, but from three different and deservedly beloved female companions—as we approach the end of Series 4. In “Forest of the Dead” and “Journey’s End” Ten forces on his current, former, and future companions three pretty awful fates that they would never have chosen for themselves. In none of these cases does he ask their permission, consent, or opinion first. To make matters worse, in each case, Ten’s forcing this fate on a companion who never asked for it is presented by the episode as a noble decision that he makes for the companion’s own good and at great personal cost to himself.

After River sacrifices herself to save the Library patrons trapped in the hard drive—a rough end for an important character, but again, she goes out a hero, and it’s so much her choice that she actually has to handcuff Ten to a pole while she does it—the Doctor “saves” her by zapping her consciousness (stored on the sonic screwdriver he gave her) back into the hard drive. She winds up condemned—forever—to the kind of existence from which she died to save Donna and the others. This, to me, is a problem. I can’t imagine anyone would enjoy an eternity as a data ghost in a virtual reality; but it would be especially wrong for River Song, always the most active, peripatetic, and thrill-seeking of the companions. Do you think River Song would have chosen an eternity of hanging out on the hospital grounds chatting with the members of her expedition team? Is she going to like knowing that nothing she feels, does, or has, is real? I don’t fucking think so; and yet we’re shown that image of her tucking her 3 kids into bed (it matters that there are 3, because that means the virtual reality program is finally functioning at full capactiy now and can afford to make more than 2 simulated children) and turning off the lights as if this is going to make it all better. NO! Jesus! Let her die! Is not Death the greatest adventure of all? Or if death is just nothingness, wouldn’t her atoms have a better time returning to the universe as energy and going through its eternal metamorphosis? Why trap her in something that is neither life nor death? Why do children tucked in their beds make that somehow OK?

Well, that was Moffat’s fault. But we can’t blame Moffat for what happens to Rose in “Journey’s End.” The Doctor, pissed off about the fact that Ten Too has an ill-controlled genocidal streak, dumps him off with Rose at Bad Wolf Bay and basically tells her to babysit him for the rest of his and/or her natural life. All this stuff about how Ten Too will age and so she can actually have a real relationship with him is kind of bullshit. She doesn’t love the new guy in the blue suit; she loves Ten, and that WTF? look never quite leaves her face, even when she’s kissing Ten Too. WTF did Rose ever do to deserve this bizarre arranged marriage? Wouldn’t it have been better to let the end of Series 2 be the last we saw of her? Even though it’s tragic?

Nor can we blame Moffat for what happens to Donna. Once again, the Doctor doesn’t ask for Donna’s consent before mind-wiping her. Not only that, but he knows full well that a) she knows exactly what her choices are and b) she has chosen the exact opposite of what he forces on her. He asks her if she knows what’s happening to her; she says yes. She’s crying when she says it, so you know it’s true. But then she says, “I want to stay.” She says that knowing that if she stays she will die. And when he’s moving in to mind-wipe her, she is begging him not to do it. And he does it anyway. And THAT is what is not OK.

And because he does it anyway, we don’t just say goodbye to Donna at the end of Series 4. We lose her completely. Her character is gutted, dismantled, and diminished. Her dignity is wiped out along with her memories. And that is also not OK.

Moving on to the Moffat verse…well, we have new problems. And as much as I objected to Donna’s exit, I would say that the Moffatproblems are worse, and that Amelia’s Last Farewell is a pretty good demonstration of why.

Moffat likes happy endings. He also likes Grand Emotions. He reconciles these two somewhat incompatible desires by killing people to generate the feels and then waving a wand and bringing them back to life for no reason that makes any sense. He wants the happy ending but without the price. At the end of Series 5 and Series 6, not only is the universe saved, not only are Eleven and the Ponds still standing, but the dead have risen from their non-graves. Which is great if you love a happy ending and you don’t care if it’s unearned. All this is rather a problem, however, when it’s time to say goodbye to a beloved companion and you want to do a traditional heartbreaking Wrenching Asunder.

Apart from undoing death itself, Moffat’s other major problem as showrunner is that a) he can’t do anything once and b) whatever it is he’s repeating, it gets worse every time. River falling out the airlock and getting picked up by the TARDIS that first time was mighty cool. It was less cool when she did it again in “Day of the Moon.” And when she threw herself out the window in “Let’s Kill Hitler.” And then, in “The Snowmen,” Moffat throws Clara off the cloud…and you’re yelling, Jesus, Eleven, you’re IN the fucking TARDIS, go catch her, you know how this works!…but no, Clara hits the pavement, for no other reason than that he needs her to die a tear-jerking death (which is also not permanent). Same thing with the Weeping Angels. They were so fucking cool in “Blink.” I loved them. They were such a great idea and so silent and creepy and there was a set of rules for how they worked that made sense and allowed for that nifty final trick—the TARDIS disappearing and thus catching the angels in each other’s gazes and freezing them forever. He brings them back in Season 5, and they deteriorate into slavering rabid B-grade horror movie villains. Then they come back for “Angels Take Manhattan”…and he turns the fucking Statue of Liberty into a weeping angel, which requires him to jettison most of the original rules from “Blink” (the Statue of Liberty is surely always being observed by SOMEONE; how’s she moving?) as well as the new ones he made up in season 5 (if the image of an angel becomes itself an angel…do you have any idea how many images of the Statue of Liberty there are in NYC? Why is the whole place not a ghost town?). 

Another thing he repeats is Rory and Amy’s exit. Eleven says goodbye to them; but they come back. They try to separate from him; but they can’t. In “The Power of Three” there’s a long conversation between Amy and Eleven about the possibility of them “stopping;” but they don’t. The constant rehearsals really take the punch out of the final separation. Even within “Angels Take Manhattan” their exit is repeated twice: first when Rory and Amy plunge to their non-death from the top of Winter Quay, and then in the episode’s final minutes. And it’s here you see him paying the price for all that dead-is-not-dead from seasons 5 and 6. Even Rory is standing there reassuring Amy that he’ll be just fine because isn’t he always? How many times has he died or disappeared and come back? Plus, unless you’re Clara or Sherlock, falling from a great height is never fatal in Moffatverse. (And come to think of it…neither Clara nor Sherlock is really dead either.)

So when we finally get to the ending, which ought to be legitimately tragic, and as big a deal as Rose’s exit was, it just can’t be. Moffat’s cried wolf too many times already; and even after Amy goes back in time to be with Rory, he just can’t let us sit with the feels. He must immediately scramble for the fairytale ending by sending Eleven back to read Amy’s afterword, which assures us that they had fine and happy lives, and then back to the image of the child Amelia looking up for the TARDIS. 

Anyway. My goodness this got long. My point is: it’s not just about whether the ending is happy. It’s about what happens to the character on the way out, and specifically, for me, about agency and dignity. River, Donna, and Amy really all deserved better sendoffs. Eleven’s trying to pressure Amy to abandon Rory and come back to the TARDIS with him is really just as wrong as what Ten does to Donna, and for the same reasons: Eleven in that moment doesn’t care what Amy wants or what’s good for her, he’s just terrified at the prospect of not having her around any more. But at least Amy dies being true to the best version of herself. Donna’s the only one who loses her agency, her dignity, and herself on the way out. And that’s why her exit hurts so much worse.


End file.
